The Starry Maiden

The Memory Corridor

My eyes open, revealing an undulating and unending landscape with no visible source of light, despite it being well lit. Looking around I discover that everything is the same.

The floor's waves swell and in the distance it looks as though there are higher structures. I begin to walk towards them, but no matter how far I walk, they are always just out of sight. I keep walking, then I run for a while. But the structures never get closer. They stay firmly set in the ever-foggy distance.

I wander the space a little more before sitting down.

After a while, my mind begins to wander and things begin to appear, things from my past. An image of the journal I –kind of—kept while living with Astraeus and Eos. The diadem I often wore in public so that the humans wouldn't approach me as one of them and so that I could avoid—most of— the mistreatment they often suffered at the hands of so many of the Isu. Various weapons that I've favoured over the years.

Then I see one thing I never wanted to see again; I crawl backwards away from it, but it starts to get closer to me opening to reveal the writing carved along the inside.

The box I sank in.

Could this be...

"The Memory Corridor." I whip around to see a near gleeful Moore standing there, he is dressed in a white lab coat with a business suit beneath it. "It's meant to be the transition space between the real world and the world of memories in the Animus. I have plugged into a separate Animus to temporarily join you here." He looks around, "Awfully desolate place, but it is meant to be. It's a place where you're meant to leave yourself behind to step into the shoes of another. Although usually one's appearance here reflects what memories are being loaded... I was curious to see what this experiment in imprisonment might result in." I watch him as he circles me, surveying me up and down, "This is curious indeed... Is this how you see yourself?" I look down at myself to see that I'm dressed in the Assassins robes that I once wore darting around the rooftops of late Renaissance-Era Istanbul, I glance to my left hand and spy the ring sitting there, "Where did this self-image come from I wonder... Did you use an Animus with them to see the Auditore memories of the past?" He knows his history, I remain silent. Can they see all of the things around. I whip around to see all of the images from before have vanished, "Never mind that, for now. I am most interested in how it is that it took near on a dozen tranquilizer darts, and a sniper shot to your shoulder to stop you? What did you find in the Isu site Aurora was excavating?" So he thinks that some Isu artifact in the site mom was excavation did this... Alright... That's better than him knowing the truth. I can work with this.

"I... I don't really know what happened to me that made this happen." I start and he raises his eyebrows, "We had run away from the place where we had been staying, and went to this cave... In the cave mom showed me something... And everything lit up, it was unbelievable."

"Did you see an object? A sphere perhaps?" He fishes for what kind of artifact it was, his excitement palpable.

"But why I am here? Why for so long?" As I finish asking the questions he smiles in an unsettling way.

"Because by keeping you unconscious we can keep you without having any more... Complications." That's what he's calling my near escape? A complication. He gestures to the blank space, "This is a wonderful prison, no? A place where, if you aren't connecting to any ancestor's memories, all you have for company is your own mind. You can call this a punishment for trying to escape. That was quite the effort though, you had my guard teams utterly bamboozled. We all believed the meek act quite thoroughly. I must applaud your performance. But why did you stay so long then? Were you trying to get something?"